The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Many systems require networks to be monitored for the occurrence of various network conditions. Examples of such systems are intrusion detection systems, fault management systems, and service level assurance systems.
According to one approach, a monitoring application resides outside the network and receives network data from various entities on a network. The monitoring application monitors the network for the occurrence of various network conditions by analyzing the data received from the network entities.
This approach can become problematic as networks grow larger and systems become more sophisticated. As the network grows larger, the number of entities providing data to the monitoring application increase. In addition, as the systems become more sophisticated, the number of network conditions to be detected also increase. In many cases, the increasing size of the network and increasing sophistication of the system can overburden the monitoring application, thus slowing down the detection of network conditions. Furthermore, maintaining the monitoring application often incurs additional expense and administrative efforts.
What is needed is an approach for more effectively monitoring a network for various network conditions, while also limiting the expense and administrative efforts that are needed to maintain the system.